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Description
Creativity, the ability to produce ideas that are both original and appropriate, is often studied via abstract tasks that overlook the critical role of domain-specific expertise. Furthermore, while quantitative assessment of creative responses has advanced in the verbal domain, it remains underexplored in musical creativity. This PhD project investigates how musical expertise shapes creative cognition and explores objective measures for its assessment. Study 1 introduced the Musical Divergent Thinking Test (MDTT) with several objective measures. Unlike standard creativity tests, the MDTT distinguished amateur and professional pianists. Study 2 further validated Lempel-Ziv complexity as a quantitative measure of musical creativity, revealing non-linear U-shape relationships where musical responses with moderate complexity were rated most creative. Finally, Study 3 uses fMRI and an MRI-compatible piano keyboard to compare neural dynamics of musical and verbal creative idea generation in pianists. Together, these studies demonstrate that expertise shapes cognitive and neural mechanisms of musical creativity.